Half-Sick of Shadows (11 page)

‘Ah, Mr Pike. Come in. Come in.’

I crossed the threshold and reached up to shake the soft, moist and warm hand he offered. ‘Have a seat. Do you mind if I call you Edward? Hmm? Good. Good. Well, Edward. My first name is Maurice, but you have to call me Mr Mulholland, I’m afraid. It’s school rules, you see. If we all called each other by our first names we would get terribly confused. The place is coming down with Johns, Peters and Patricks.’ He consulted the sheet of paper he’d been reading. ‘You have an older brother here at Whitehead House, Gregory. I know about him. And, to be frank … We had a Frank once, come to think of it. Don’t get many, though. We do have a Freddy or two … Anyway, to be frank, Edward, I trust you will gain much more
from
your school career than your brother has gained from his.’

The headmaster smiled at me. It was horrible, but he meant well.

The display of such headmasterly pleasantness made punishment unlikely. I relaxed, but only fractionally. The chair’s legs were longer than my own. Most things with length were longer than my legs. Father said that, unless I sprouted, my arse would trail the ground. My feet and the floor had a sizeable gap between. Mr Mulholland retreated to the other side of his desk. I swung my legs nervously and wondered why he had summoned me there.

‘Edward. I want you to think of me as someone you can trust. Can you do that?’ I squeaked in reply. ‘Good. Good. Tell me, how are you finding things? You’ve been here, what, a week and a bit now?’ He waited. I didn’t know which things he meant. ‘Bed comfortable? Food okay? I know it’s not as good as your mother’s food, but we all have to make sacrifices. During the war we were on rations. Do you know about the war and rations? No? Well, that’s one of the many things you’ll learn about. What would you like to know about most? Go on, ask me anything you like and I’ll prove to you how splendid an education can be.’

I thought of a question straight away. ‘Do dogs go to Heaven?’

‘Mmm. Good question.’ He opened a drawer, took out a bag of boiled sweets, circumnavigated his desk and offered me one en route. It would have been rude to refuse. ‘Butter Balls,’ he said. ‘My favourites. Take another one and put it in your pocket for later.’ I did, while sucking on the first one. ‘Do dogs go to Heaven? That’s a tough one. Are you a dog lover? Have you lost a dog recently, Edward?’

‘No. I found one. It was dead.’

One of his eyebrows hopped – just once. ‘In that case, I can tell you, without fear of contradiction, that if there’s a Heaven for dogs, and if the dog you found was a good dog, then it has gone to Heaven.’

Since I had no idea whether Tennyson had been a good dog, Mr Mulholland’s answer proved nothing concerning the splendidness
of
an education. Unimpressed, unconvinced, but unwilling to argue with him so early in our relationship, I sucked my Butter Ball.

‘I believe you encountered my wife’s hairdresser.’

‘Yes. She did this.’ I pointed at my head.

‘Did she indeed? What do you think of it?’

‘Father says you can’t win them all.’

‘Mmm. Very true. Charming woman though, eccentricity with her scissors notwithstanding … Wobble. Weeble. Or something.’

‘Wivvle.’

Saying Wipple was hard with a boiled sweet in my mouth.

He smacked the desk and pointed his finger at me: ‘That’s her! I knew it started with W. Good old Mrs Wivvle! She cuts my hair too.’ He bent forward and patted his as-good-as-bald crown, which made me snurfle and choke on my Butter Ball.

‘Because of our common acquaintance, Mrs Wivvle of hedge-sculpting fame, I shall keenly follow your progress, Edward. Good luck.’ Mr Mulholland smiled me back over the threshold.

December came at last. The final days of my first term were upon me. We had two terms each year: the first lasting until Christmas and the second until June. The blessed final day glowed fractionally beyond the tips of my fingers like Sophia’s face when she held a torch up to it in the dark – frighteningly exciting in its grotesque otherness. I’d never had a final day of term before.

The entire school spent the run-up to its annual Christmas play preparing for the extravaganza. This year’s offering would be a traditional nativity. The student population’s good and gifted – predominantly music and drama club members from the senior school – began rehearsing in mid-November. The student population’s keen but talentless, those who would fill the stage as trees and potted plants – including me – had been preparing too, painting and cutting out knotty branches and sunflower face masks.

One morning, a senior pupil delivered a note to Miss Walker
while
, with blunt scissors, I hacked at cardboard hoping it would evolve into a petal for a kinetic tree – whatever a kinetic tree might be.

Blinky Mulholland had summoned me to his office.

Again? Twice in a single term?

I feared that he had intercepted my letters to Sophia, discovered how much I hated school, and planned to punish me in some unspeakable way.

Counting my steps, I walked many long corridors to get to his office on two very short legs. I walked half of the corridors walking forwards, and the other half walking backwards to see if the backward half got me to my destination in fewer steps and quicker. The forward steps went 12345 … and the backward steps went 1 2 3 4 5. I lost count when I backed into Mr Clarke and he told me to watch where I was going, stupid boy. Anyway, I didn’t know if walking backwards was quicker because I didn’t have a watch.

When I got there, I knocked on his door breathing nervously, but breathing, thankfully, none the less.

‘Enter.’

I did.

Blinky’s office was bright and dusty, like the man himself. Like the man himself, it smelled of polish and pipe tobacco.

‘Edward! How glad I am that you could spare the time to see me. Have a seat. Make yourself at home.’ The chair in front of his desk was unusually high. Either it was a different chair from the one I sat on last time or I had shrunk. I managed to mount it with a small leap. ‘I know how busy you are, what with the nativity dramatization and so on. That’s one of the things I wanted to see you about: the nativity. You’re not actually doing anything on stage, are you? I understand that you don’t have a role.’

My jaw, I think, hung open for a time. When he said role, I thought of soup. The best reply I could think of was ‘Not on me’. But it didn’t seem right. In fact, it didn’t seem to have anything to do with
the
nativity – unless they had some kind of Feast of Passover bread in the manger, beside the milk bottle and stack of nappies.

‘You haven’t been given a part to play?’

Oh! That kind of role!

‘Not at first,’ I said. ‘But I have now.’

‘Wonderful! How did that come about?’

‘I asked Miss Walker if I could be Jesus, but she said we’re having a doll for that because Jesus has no lines to say and He doesn’t need to do anything like walk about, because infants don’t. She said a rolled-up towel could be Jesus if somebody accidentally stood on the doll and broke it. I said that might be blasphemy, standing on Jesus, but she said not to be stupid. I didn’t think it was stupid, but anyway I asked her if I could be Joseph instead, and she said they already had a Joseph. He’s got black sticky tape for a moustache and a charcoal beard. She said what about a shepherd or the back end of a donkey, but I said I’d rather be a wise man, and she said she already had more wise men than she could shake a stick at, but I could be a kinetic tree if I want. I said all right even though I don’t know what a kinetic tree is. What’s a kinetic tree?’

Blinky looked impressed. ‘I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting one. From the Greek,
kinein
, meaning move. We’re talking movement here. At a guess, I’d say it’s a tree with feet. You have feet, don’t you?’ I said I did and dangled them at him. ‘There you are,’ he said. ‘You’re perfectly qualified for the job.’

‘Miss Walker said I could help paint the props.’

‘Really? Good. Good. We need a talented prop painter; it’s a very important job. And how’s it going then, the prop painting?’

‘Not bad. It was going better until I ran out of brown paint. There’s plenty of green for the leaves, but there’s no brown for the trunks. Miss Walker said I could paint the tree trunks blue and nobody would notice because the lights would make them look brown.’

‘Excellent.’

‘I tried mixing blue with red to see if it made brown, but it didn’t.
It
just made a bit of a mess. But I cleaned it up, and Miss Walker said I’d have to experiment to find what colours mixed to make brown, but not to worry about it because blue tree trunks would be fine. I need red for the flowers …’

‘Look here, Edward. Let’s set the nativity aside. There’s something else I want to talk to you about. How can I put it? It has come to my notice that you are what I can only call a precocious child. Miss Walker is of the opinion that your current study schedule is not challenging enough. Do you agree with her?’

If a teacher says something – anything – that requires a response, the most obvious thing to do is agree. However, intuiting some kind of punishment – such as being restricted to a diet of bread and water until I started finding the work harder, although bread and water might have been an improvement, except on Saturdays when we got chips – I gave him a cautious nod of my head while thinking that a shake of it might have been wiser.

‘You’re finding the work we’re giving you too easy?’

‘Well … Before I came to school I thought there would be lots of work to do, but it’s mostly play things.’

‘You’re only five, Pike. Theoretical Physics is next year.’

‘Is it?’ I asked, perking up.

‘No, of course it isn’t. Don’t be silly. Look here: we believe you would benefit if given the opportunity to work harder. Practice, you know. It may not always make perfect, but it improves, it enhances, it opens new doors. Do you follow, Pike?’

Not really. ‘Yes, Sir.’

Blinky looked less than convinced.

How could I find easy work hard? I could close one eye, I supposed, but I would see the same thing, and closing one eye wouldn’t make half my brain stop working. Then it came to me. When we played spelling in the Manse with Mother, she gave me a handicap of four. First to get ten spellings correct won the game, but I started at minus four. Maybe Blinky intended something similar. It
was
a good idea, and could be put to use in other areas, such as sports. I could compete with the others on the running track and football field if they were given handicaps such as blindfolds or their legs tied together.

‘While chewing over your problem of finding work too easy, Edward, I came up with an idea. What about this. You understand, at this stage I want your honest opinion. What about if, starting from next term – that is, when you return from your Christmas break – what about if Miss Walker gives you more homework to do. And not only more, but work of a more taxing nature. In other words, starting from next term, why not set about stretching that unique brain of yours and seeing how much elasticity it has. What do you think of that?’

I thought of rubber bands. ‘If you stretch elastic too far it snaps,’ I said, imagining my head in its present shape – not quite round and a bit lumpy – then like a banana on its back, then like a skipping rope, then like the ball of string that we measured the boundary with, and … Ping!

Blinky looked as if he had not known that elastic snaps until I told him. ‘You’re of the opinion that if we make you work harder you’ll snap?’

‘No,’ I reassured him, fully aware that heads are made of bone, and bone isn’t stretchy. ‘If I got harder work …’ I said.

‘Yes?’

‘Doing it would take longer.’

‘But the reward, in terms of satisfaction, would be huge.’

‘Could I spend more time in the library?’

‘Would you like that?’

‘I’d like that more than anything,’ I said with certainty. More than anything except quitting school and going home, but I kept that to myself.

‘Then, Edward, as from next term you shall be found in the library much more than at present, I should imagine. Do we have a deal?’ I
said
we did. Blinky came round to my side of his desk and we shook on it.

‘Good. Good. Excellent!’ said Blinky.

8

Christmas and the White Lady

The night of the Christmas play arrived. Parents came from near and far to applaud their occasionally stagestruck but mainly inept young. Cameras flashed. Cardboard trees fell over. Tone deaf carol singers sang carols before the final curtain. Stale cakes and stewed tea were served and consumed standing up.

Most parents took their progeny home for the festive holiday. Mother and Father never attended these end-of-term extravaganzas. Gregory had never taken part in a performance. Mother and Father did not attend this year either. I followed in my elder brother’s footsteps.

We were allowed to do whatever we wanted – within reason – on the last morning of term. It was a plain-clothes morning, which meant that we did not have to wear our uniforms, not that, as one bright spark thought, we had to play policemen.

After Christmas dinner in the canteen at noon, we were free to leave, be collected by parents, or whatever. Christmas dinner differed from other school dinners by a splash of brown gravy and a cut of meat purporting to be turkey.

The only occurrence before dinner worth noting on that final morning was one that would happen on every final morning, Christmas and summer, during my school career. Miss Walker gave
me
a sealed brown envelope with ‘Mr and Mrs Pike’ typed on the front. ‘Don’t open this,’ she instructed. ‘It’s for your parents.’ I would have worried, but everyone else got one too.

Like a small flower out of the earth, I emerged from the junior building. Like a weed, Gregory sprouted from the senior building ten minutes later. We passed through the same gate, but ten minutes apart, and met at the railway station without suitcases, without eye contact, without warmth. Without saying a word, we boarded the train. I had a satchel slung over a shoulder. Gregory carried a cardboard folder with next to nothing in it: his workload. There were a lot of school children like us on board, but neither Gregory nor I spoke to them and they didn’t speak to us. I would have enjoyed the ride if Gregory had let me sit at the window.